.::: FLTI :::.

October 14, 2023

The internationalist event was held of the International Workers Organizer, voice of the FLTI

Introduction

Imperialism concentrates its forces
to crush the Palestinian nation and
rearm its counterrevolutionary device
in the Middle East

Excerpts from the Intervention of comrade Carlos Munzer

To begin with, I wanted to tell you that we were preparing this conference on the electoral trap, the ferocious attack of the capitalists and the brutal economic, political and social crisis that is going on in Argentina. And while we were in this job, we suddenly found ourselves in front of an action of the Palestinian resistance of an enormous magnitude, which hit the settlers who, armed to the teeth, have expropriated and robbed the Palestinian people of the lands surrounding Gaza. In response, today we are witnessing a Zionist counter-offensive that threatens to sweep Gaza, an open-air concentration camp where more than two and a half million Palestinians are imprisoned, out of this world.

The bourgeois leadership of Hamas had been responding to the attacks of the Zionist occupation forces with military actions, which then allowed it to negotiate a status quo where Gaza always remained a real ghetto, not unlike the Apartheid's Bantustans.
But this time, none of this worked. The fact is that the Zionist response is the beginning of a real counter-offensive by the US imperialism, which seeks to place the State of Israel as their military spearhead in the Middle East, so that it can once again use its firepower to maintain order in the region. It is clear that the counterrevolutionary forces of the State of Israel had been unable to use their firepower on behalf of imperialism in years of revolutionary mass uprisings throughout the Middle East that began back in 2011.
After its defeat in Iraq in 2008 and its bogging down in Afghanistan, with an American people in revolt against the imperialist wars, the U.S. was very careful not to make Zionism its shock force against the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, Algeria, Yemen, etc.... This would have meant uniting all these uprisings to crush the State of Israel. It amounted to adding fuel to the fire of the revolutionary processes that were underway.
Imperialism then left this role to the cowardly and murderous Arab bourgeoisies, both Sunni and Shiite, to massacre, deceive and divide the uprising of the Arab and Muslim masses. It spared no effort to bring the murderous Putin to massacre the Syrian revolution, together with the butcher al-Assad, before it reached from Tunis, passing through Damascus, to Jerusalem. Turkey went on to play a central role collaborating with al-Assad, Putin and the US imperialism in the partition of Syria, or intervening directly in Libya in permanent war.
Imperialism is then preparing a new counter-offensive against the world working class, and the attack that is underway in Palestine, at the hands of Zionism, is part of it.

To understand the events that are beginning to accelerate in Argentina, every conscious worker must gain a strategic vision of the current actions of imperialism at world level. We are in a country in bankruptcy, with contained hyperinflation, indebted to the marrow, with 60% under poverty line and millions of slaves flexibilized by the capitalists. A real crisis of the regime of domination and bankruptcy of the parties and all the institutions of the bourgeoisie has opened up, where the working class has been tied up and divided by the perfidious role of the traitorous trade union bureaucracy.

These international conditions will allow us to shed light on how the ruling elites and their parties act in Argentina which, in their different variants, are intervening today in the electoral trap orchestrated by the US Embassy.
Here imperialism is also preparing to strike a strategic blow to change the historical relationship of forces imposed by the working class with the revolutionary processes of 2001. We insist, a strategic counterrevolutionary response is what the regime and imperialism are preparing.
As we could see in the last primary elections (PASO), the disbelief of the masses in the regime is enormous. This was expressed in a massive abstention and blank vote, and the emergence of the "Milei phenomenon" on the right, which drags along broad layers of the desperate dispossessed masses and the upper middle class. This time it is the bourgeoisie that seeks to give a strategic response to the crisis of the regime as a whole, which is nothing more than the expression of the end of a mode of capitalist accumulation based on indebtedness, plundering, the flight abroad of foreign currency and national income, such as agrarian, oil, etc.
As we will see later, imperialism is coming for the country's sources of raw materials. It has decided that the time of flirting with the people is over and has already brought out the whip of proto-fascist movements like that of Milei, of gendarmes like Juntos por el Cambio or that of Peronism with the social pact of the trade union bureaucracy, a real police inside the workers' organizations.
The big bourgeoisie sees that it already has 60% of the labor force flexibilized, with the traitors of the union bureaucracy tying the hands of the proletariat and surrendering each one of its struggles these years, with a parliamentary left that has disorganized and refused to regroup the left wing of the working class that led a thousand and one battles. The ruling classes have already taken note that there are millions of unemployed, self-employed, underemployed workers without any kind of collective bargaining agreement who are desperate masses who have nothing to eat the next day; an enormous industrial reserve army that the capitalists can put back into the productive process for a dime, and already flexibilized.
The order has already come from the US Embassy and the big economic groups: the Argentine proletariat must be strategically defeated, its conquests, taken away from it and the nation wholly plundered. This decisive attack is and will continue to be a link of a strategic imperialist counter-offensive on its Latin America "backyard", where enormous mass combats have been waged since 2019 and at the exit of the pandemic.
No one can be fooled here. The enormous monetary emission, the flight of foreign currency and the payment to imperialism can only be solved by the bourgeoisie if it takes from the working class as a whole a new mass of surplus value. The rows developing among their different sectors are about what is the best way to do it. Some think that the trade union bureaucracy is the best tool to give in the collective bargaining agreements; others think that liquidating the unions is the best decision.

As we can see, Argentina and the Middle East are an example of how imperialism reacts to the world crisis that since 2008 has hit the US, and to the rise and revolutionary struggles that have swept different sectors of the planet, although in a desynchronized way.
Only from here can we understand the regional wars that are developing today, as in Ukraine, or those that were recently having an outbreak, as in Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus.

The US has entered into a crisis in its control of the world economy and politics, which is disputed at every step by competing powers, whether imperialist or big commercial bourgeoisies like China or Russia, which renegotiate their conditions in the world market. This and its own crisis call into question its hegemony. The political, economic and military balances of the planet have been broken and cannot be restored. The short cycles of capitalist growth are only short breaths.
U.S. imperialism must break this impasse if it wants not to enter an open phase of decadence. And once again it is returning to the planet by waging counterrevolutionary offensives and wars to retake control of the world market, its sources of raw materials and branches of production and, as we have been insisting from the FLTI, to take over definitively and directly the internal Chinese market and the sources of raw materials of "Great Russia"...

U.S. imperialism is then responding to this situation by concentrating its forces in hot spots of revolution, counter-revolution and wars in key sectors of the planet, where it intends to exemplify and discipline its competitors. We have already seen this in Europe. In recent decades, the European Union, organized around the Franco-German axis, had reconstituted its "living space" from Portugal to the Russian steppes. This was done under the aegis of Germany; however it had been that imperialist power that lost the Second World War. A real anomaly.
As we have already seen when considering the Ukrainian question, the US threw Ukraine as a pawn for Putin to split it, exhaust it and push it more and more towards its colonization, but wearing itself and "Great Russia" out in the attempt... US imperialism brought to bear the full weight of NATO to subdue the Franco-German axis. That is to say, imperialism struck a strategic blow in Ukraine, what places itself directly on the borders of Russia, not only those of Europe but also those of Asia. For this purpose, it counted on and used the appetite for oppression and banditry of the butcher Putin to invade, divide and bleed a punished and plundered oppressed nation like Ukraine, even with the Moscow gang stealing a part of it like Crimea and the Donbass.
This coup of Anglo-US imperialism in Ukraine will also be a lesson for all the former Soviet republics. This is what Azerbaijan's attack is all about, expelling the Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh, and preparing a war also of extermination of the Armenian people, to control with BP and Turkey as a junior partner, the oil routes of the Caucasus.

We insist that US imperialism seeks to deliver strategic blows to restore its hegemony in politics and the world economy. This was done yesterday with the Geneva Pacts. It carried out a counterrevolutionary blow in Syria, where al-Assad did “the dirty work” of crushing a revolution with the largest genocide of the 21st century. He had the invaluable collaboration of Putin and the Iranian ayatollahs, with whom he never broke political and economic relations. Syria was left divided, with US keeping all the oil, and with its defeat the revolutionary processes that began in Tunisia in 2011 were contained. This blocked the way for the entire revolutionary tide that threatened to reach Jerusalem.
Stalinism, together with the Arab bourgeoisies and the vertex same Palestinian bourgeoisie, kept the world working class and in particular the Palestinian people “neutral” in the face of the massacre of the Syrian people. And now, the Palestinian people are suffering the same destruction of their homes, cities and villages as the Syrian masses had yesterday.

World imperialism is in crisis and bankruptcy. The Wall Street crash of 2008, the stock market explosions of 2017 and 2019, the bankruptcy of commercial banks this year, are the expression that capitalism accumulates values and distributes profits that human work has not yet produced.
There are too many imperialist powers. One or more of these have to pay for the crisis. The imperialist power that gets Moscow's sources of raw materials, the Chinese internal market, the control of the oil routes of the Maghreb and the Middle East, the uranium, coltan, copper, diamonds and gold from martyred Africa, and the large lithium expanses of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru, will be the winning one, which will have cheap raw materials and new markets at their disposal, over the ruin of the others. If they achieve this, they will have defeated the international proletariat, something that they are still far, very far from achieving.
Today imperialism steps into the Middle East with Zionism and it is the first time since the Iraq war that intervenes with this protective shield in the region. And it is forced to act this way. Iraq is in an open revolutionary situation, with a state in a phase of disintegration, with the masses entering and leaving the government house. The Yemeni masses have not given up. The murderous regime of the ayatollahs has been jeopardized by a great rise of the proletariat and the exploited that threatens to leave it in crisis. There is a situation of mass rise in Lebanon that has put in crisis Hezbollah's control. The workers of Egypt are preparing to return to combat. That is, the masses are threatening to return for their revolution. Therefore, for imperialism “it is now or never” and that is the war cry of Netanyahu and Biden.
“It is now or never,” the Argentine bourgeoisie also shouts to deal a strategic blow to the Argentine labor movement, and be able to loot lithium, hydrocarbons, minerals, food, etc.
“It's now or never,” shout BP and Turkey to conquer the oil routes in the Caucasus.

In Palestine we are therefore not facing a tactical clash between Hamas and the fascist State of Israel. We insist, the US is going for everything in the region. United States Department of State magazine, Foreign Affairs, warns that the Zionists will not be able to impose this intended offensive, even with the collaboration they will receive from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and from Iran itself to contain the Palestinians in Lebanon. This magazine issues a warning saying that the US cannot accompany Zionism to the cemetery, since it will not only awaken all the Palestinian masses, but also those of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, the entire Maghreb and the Middle East and even Europe and the same USA.
Biden and the party of “progressive” Democrats (as Stalinism has dressed it) have proven to be most warmongering. They already have a sea fleet in the Zionist state and are sending another war fleet to the Mediterranean shores. Let's remember that the bourgeoisie is also a social force that seeks to change the relationship of forces in its favor, because it knows that either it does it or loses. In the case of US imperialism, it may lose its control of the world economy and start its decline. If that happens, it will not be able to contain the revolutionary energies that the masses still retain despite and against the traitorous leaderships such as the Stalinist crap and the liquidator currents of the Fourth International.

The latter dissolved our world party and imposed parties and united fronts with Stalinism. In many countries they openly entered the fronts of class collaboration or called to support them politically. It is clear that the bourgeoisie and its regimes have resorted, in order to divert and contain the revolutionary processes, to the old policy of class collaboration, which ties the workers' organizations to the bourgeoisies that pose as "progressive" but only dampen the gunpowder and seek, with sweet phrases, to get the masses off the revolutionary path.
The US American left also did this by supporting Sanders, and then Biden “against Trump”, and the governments that diverted the revolutionary processes of recent years in Latin America, as we have already seen.
In other parts of the planet, with nationalist preventive coups the officer castes of the armies anticipated the anti-imperialist revolutionary irruption of the masses to control it. This is happening throughout the Sahel.
The union bureaucracies in Europe, such as the Stalinist ones in France, Greece or the Spanish State, or the social democratic ones in England, contain the struggle of the working class, which at every step resist hard attacks in the metropolises.
In Africa, the renegades of Trotskyism have entered the Stalinist parties directly as fractions of them, as in South Africa, Congo, Nigeria, etc.
They are continuing the work of the already decaying World Social Forum, which was in charge, with the native bourgeoisies, Castroism, and Stalinism at the head, of containing the revolutionary processes of the world proletariat at the beginning of the 21st century. They all promised “Socialism of the 21st century” like Chavez with its “Bolivarian Revolution” scam. They also preached “market socialism”, while supporting the slavery and apartheid regime of the Chinese Stalinist bourgeoisie. They finished handing over Cuba to imperialism and a voracious capitalist restoration. And what is more serious, they set up the so-called “Global War on Terrorism” that allowed al-Assad and Putin to massacre the Syrian revolution.
This front of recycled Stalinists needed a dissolved Fourth International to legitimize it.

Sooner or later in Palestine they will try to set up the “Global War on Terrorism”. They are already trying to do it. But the problem they have is that the Palestinian masses have been adopted by the world working class. And the millions who are today demonstrating in support of the Palestinian people have already left behind the limits and barriers that these new reformist leaderships had imposed to prevent an international mass combat.

Millions are winning the streets throughout the Middle East, Europe and on the five continents. Imperialism seeks to align itself with Zionism. But the workers of the world, despite and against their leaderships, rise up alongside the Palestinian masses.
The class war has not stopped. It only gets deeper. The traitorous and reformist leaderships lull the masses to sleep. They undo what the masses conquer in their combat. They desynchronize their struggles country by country.

But with the Palestinian question you can no longer play hide and seek. The exploited of the world have identified their enemy: Zionism and the imperialism that sustains it. The veil concealing the genocidal al-Assad and his partner Putin are falling... the Syrian masses of the liberated areas are rising up against Zionism, while al-Assad, Putin and the US imperialists prevent these marches in the areas they control of divided Syria.

The time for an international struggle of the exploited masses has arrived. Today is for Palestine, and tomorrow should be to unite and coordinate the fight of the working class against their executioners: imperialism, the capitalists and their regimes.
The time for militant internationalism has arrived as a life and death necessity for the global working class. The only party that has fought ceaselessly for this has been and continue to be the Fourth International and all the currents that remain firmly under its flags. The proletariat needs the Fourth International to live up to this period of crisis, wars and revolutions that is only deepening.